My fifth month teaching English in a small northern Italian city called Varese, a place no tourist has or should ever step foot, I took up the habit of describing the “state of my soul” at the top of my diary entries. That January my soul was: a walrus, a decaffeinated tea bag in cold water, permafrosted tundra (my sex life the permafrost), a used tissue at the bottom of a backpack, rotting.

Off and on for the better part of two decades, I was casual friends with a guy named Mark. Rumor had it that he had walked in on his father right at the moment his father decided to take his own life via shotgun.

Mark was a few years older than I was, and was part of the tail end of the first wave of Phoenix punk rockers. He had been in a marginally important band that had a record out on Placebo Records, the label that was home to Jodie Foster’s Army and Sun City Girls.

I started following baseball in 1987, at the age of seven, which means the first World Series I watched was between the Twins and the Cardinals. The previous Series, of course, was won by the Mets, the team I soon came to root for, hanging posters of Darryl Strawberry and Howard Johnson on my bedroom wall. I’ve continued to follow the Mets throughout the years, but three decades later, although they’ve twice returned to the Series, they have not been able to close it out, to achieve what they did the very year before I started following them.

My counselor once told me that my tumor, the tiny tumor on my pituitary, was not me. Actually, what she said was, “You are not your tumor, Martha.” She was right, I am not my tumor. But she was also wrong, because the tumor is most certainly me. I decided in that moment that I didn’t like her.

That particular therapist is now long gone from my life, but I still have my tumor. It’s still there now, somewhere on my pituitary gland, causing problems. Surgeons tried to remove it twice and failed both times.

If you were to ask my husband about my sleep habits, he would tell you how I kick and punch, how I speak in tongues — how I even try to shove him out of our double bed. “You slept like a total maniac last night,” he’ll say nearly every weekend, coffee mug in hand, as he tries to hide his smile. I usually protest, though I know it happens far too often to be mere hyperbole.

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.”–Margaret Atwood

Glossophobia: the fear of public speaking. It’s derived from the Greek word glōssa, or tongue. This is the closest phobia I can find to “fear of speaking up.” I’m not talking about eleventh grade speech and debate, imagining your audience in their underwear. I’m talking about the fear every woman has experienced when she knows something wrong has happened but she’s too afraid of the consequences for opening her mouth.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Adronicus, Lavinia’s rapists cut out her tongue so she cannot report them. The tongue is a powerful weapon. A person who wishes to silence a woman knows that and uses their own weapons to hurt it: their power, their threats.

Sometimes on darkened sidewalks, I negotiate with my tongue, willing it to stay still. There are moments when I can speak up, and there are others when I become acutely aware that the tongue is just another part of my body, and bodies have a way of bringing trouble to a woman.

I wish for just one day, a man could know what it feels like to exist in a woman’s body. To know how hard it is to unknow it. We never for a moment forget it’s there because there is always a man nearby to talk about it or touch it, to deem it worthy or unfuckable. Women do not have the privilege of having a body in the public sphere that goes unnoticed. As soon as we step outside our front door, the world forces ownership onto our bodies. I observe it every day when I watch men stand too close to women on the trains and tell strangers they’re beautiful as they pass on the sidewalk.

There are times when I have responded: when a ‘roided out gym rat got into an argument with me over the volume of the TV and I told him never to call me “girl”; when a bus driver walked behind me in broad daylight during my afternoon run and told me he wanted to rub sunscreen all over my body. When I turned around, pulled out my earbuds to better hear him and said, “What did you say,” he repeated [...]

To be “a Pollyanna” is a complicated thing. According to Merriam-Webster, a Pollyanna is “a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything.” The original Pollyanna, the protagonist in Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel of that name, suffers endless bad luck but copes by playing “the glad game,” which consists of finding reasons to be happy about anything and everything. Pollyanna’s father teaches her the game one Christmas when Pollyanna, who is hoping for a doll, instead receives a pair of crutches from the missionary barrel. Through the game, Pollyanna decides that she is glad re: the crutches because she doesn’t need to use them. The Pollyannas and Pollyanna-ish of the world are the same way: They manage to be happy or at least optimistic about situations that others would deplore.